After releasing a sneak preview episode last week, Pablo Torre’s Meadowlark show Pablo Torre Finds Out dropped its debut episode on Tuesday. In it, Torre sat down with Dan Le Batard to listen back to clips from previous interviews he had done with Donald Trump prior to Trump being elected President of the United States in 2016.
Torre recalled the first time he co-hosted the ESPN Radio version of the show in 2015 with Dan and Stugotz in person. Pablo considered it his first real introduction to the Meadowlark family. Trump was a guest on the show that day.
It turns out that the future president had been a recurring guest from 2013-15 booked by Stugotz. Pablo had no knowledge the previous interviews even existed. They had been wiped from the internet prior to the 2016 election with the only copies saved to a physical hard drive in Miami that only Dan and select Meadowlark employees could access.
The question of why Le Batard and Stugotz chatted with Trump so much came up. Dan said it was merely at a point in time when Trump was still a reality TV game show host.
“I didn’t have any idea of what Donald Trump was,” he said. “And he was just celebrity TV ego host who was a famous person for reasons that were hard to discern. We were having him on because he was famous.”
“You have to understand that I am looking at this through the prism of I did not know back then the evil anarchy that I was dealing with,” Dan later added. “I am talking to a game show host, and so you’ve got me legitimately cringing right now.”
Clips of the conversations had clearly evidenced that Dan was treating the eventual president as they would any celebrity guest. The line of questioning, including asking who some of the most famous people Trump knew were, had Le Batard feeling mortified.
“I am deeply embarrassed realms beyond why you think I’m embarrassed,” he said. “I’m embarrassed by the sheer laziness of the question. ‘Tell me about your celebrity. Tell me about who you hob knob with. Tell me about what it’s like to be you.’ I’m just embarrassed by how little work went into that question.
Torre went on to say that despite Dan’s disappointment in questioning, Le Batard did manage to get Trump on the record talking about his links to Russian oligarchs and Saudi autocrats, which in hindsight is actually pretty amazing in Torre’s eyes.
Still, Dan felt like listening back he mailed those interviews in.
“It’s hackery of the highest order,” he said.
“Mostly what I’m embarrassed by – this is hard to say it’s hard to think – is just what a hack job that interview was. Just embarrassing as content.”
Le Batard did say that the interviews were never hard-hitting. Obviously, like a lot of other Americans at the time, the thought of Trump actually winning the presidency seemed too ridiculous for him to believe.
“I haven’t felt a long time the way that I feel right now, where I’m listening back to something that we’ve done and I’m genuinely afraid of what it is that happens next and how it is that it’s going to embarrass me,” he said. “Because in retrospect it becomes very clear how foolish we were.”
“I wanted the entertainment,” Dan added. “The spectacle of it.”
